Director:
Mikhael Subotzky
Interviewee:
Hermanus van Wyk
Camera:
Kyle Morland
Over the course of three days, Mikhael Subotzky interviews Hermanus van Wyk upstairs at A4. The lounge is recast as a film studio; A4's exhibition designer, Kyle Morland, assumes the role of cameraman and lighting technician. Together, Subotzky and van Wyk notate the latter's biography on film in an extended conversation revealing of their long acquaintance.
As part of the exhibition Tell It to the Mountains at A4 (October 21, 2021–January 20, 2022), Subotzky staged Moses and Griffiths for the first time since the deaths of both Moses Lamani and Griffiths Sokuyeka, the titular individuals on whom the film turns. The relevance of their stories as archival records prompted an invitation to van Wyk, who lives on Cape Town's streets and with whom Subotzky has remained in contact for two decades, to commit his biography to moving image and audio.
Subotzky and van Wyk first met in 2005 on a building site in downtown Cape Town. Their chance encounter has since proved mutually formative. An ex-prisoner, van Wyk was featured in Subotzky's Umjiegwana (2005), a photographic study of formally incarcerated individuals that followed the artist's Die Vier Hoeke (2004). This initial engagement became a platform for nuanced exchange between the two, who have remained in contact and worked together on a number of projects. In 2016, Van Wyk performed a fictionalised version of himself in Subotzky's film WYE, the artist's first sustained experiment with the truth.
Excerpts from the conversation filmed at A4 are included in Subotzky's Epilogue: Disordered and Flatulent (2022), the third in a trilogy of films to which Moses and Griffiths and WYE also belong.
The material collected during the interviews remains in both Subotzky's and A4's archives and is available for researchers on request.